buried saints

It can be tough to sell your house in today’s economy. Sure, you could put in new stainless steel appliances or repaint a bedroom or put in new carpet or do some landscaping. But those all sound like a lot of work. Instead, why not just bury a statue of Saint Joseph in your yard:

Debra Schneider was having trouble selling her custom-built home three years ago in Columbia County, N.Y., when a neighbor’s relative suggested she bury a statue.

“I thought she was kidding me. I told her, ‘I’m a Jewish yogi. I don’t believe in that,’ ” said Schneider, 55.

The next day, though, she went and bought a statue, figuring she had little to lose. The house sold.

“Of course, I had lowered the price, which might have helped too,” Schneider said.

(I’ll leave you to make your own “Jewish yogi” joke in the comments.)

Joseph, in case you don’t remember him from the Bible, couldn’t satisfy his wife Mary and was cuckolded by the holy spirit. Accordingly, Catholics associate him with “failure to close the deal” and believe that hiding him in the dirt helps their chances of making a sale.

You might think that religious leaders would welcome any publicity for their faith in today’s increasingly secularized world. You would be wrong:

Father Pat Lee, lead pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Chicago, regularly pleads with anxious parishioners to pray for divine aid — not to bury their church’s namesake in the dirt. When a nearby religious goods store started carrying the St. Joseph kits, he chastised the staff for encouraging “a ridiculous superstition.”

“You are burying a saint and holding him hostage in the ground until you get what you want,” Lee said. “This is not magic. This is ridiculous.”

To sum up:

Ridiculous: Burying a statue to get divine aid.
Non-Ridiculous: Praying for divine aid.

Out of politeness, we’ll ignore the fact that Father Lee seems to think that “burying a statue of someone” and “holding someone hostage” are somehow equivalent.